The Collection of Georges Matcheret and Nadia Wolkonsky

On June 29th, 2012, the State Hermitage Museum hosted the opening of “848. The Collection of Georges Matcheret and Nadia Wolkonsky.” This exhibit, which includes around 200 works, is part the Hermitage 20/21 project, a large-scale program to expand the collection of 20th and 21st century art and presenting the work of contemporary artists in the Hermitage.

In 2012, the State Hermitage Museum’s collection of contemporary art was expanded with a collection of works from the 20th‑21st centuries belonging to the family of Georges Matcheret and Nadia Wolkonsky: the artist’s 848 letters to the collector.

The envelopes presented at this exhibit were decorated by masters of the Soviet underground, Russian artists abroad and highly visible figures on the post-Soviet art scene. The small volume of the work did not demand a great deal of time from the artists, while at the same time the volume of the form was suitable to a high concentration of artistic expression.

Georges Matcheret, an economic advisor at the French embassy in the USSR in the 1980’s, who requested that artists he knew decorate a regular postal envelope, collected a collection of works that is unique in its volume and character. It is made up of a total of 848 pieces by leading Russian and Soviet, including such famous masters as Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, Ivan Chuikov, Ernst Neizvestny, Oleg Tselkov, Dmitri Prigov, and more. The collection of Matcheret and Wolkonsky (Matcheret’s spouse) is a unique illustration of Russia from the Soviet times to today.

Mail and fine art have always been closely connected. Historians of alternative philately have managed to discover the first examples of artists adding their own meaning to postal objects. In 1912, the Austrian painter and graphic artist Egon Schiele sent his friends an envelope with drawing on it, and in 1919 the German Dadaist Raoul Hausmann put a postcard in the box with his own portrait, rather than a stamp. These were, however, more likely whims rather than a strategy. The first to use the unique features of letters for artistic and artistic/political purposes were the Italian futurists. Truly radical artistic projects connected with the mail emerged at the turn of the 1950’s and 60’s; for example, the French conceptual artist Yves Klein sent invitations to his exhibits with a stamp of his own making rather than the government sign for the payment of postal fees. At the same time, the American artist Ray Johnson created his famous “correspondence art” network, laying the foundation for mail art in the cotemporary sense of the term. Today, mail art refers to any object created by an artist and sent by mail. The stamps, notes and punches of postal workers are part of the work of art. In effect, the postal workers function as a compulsory, anonymous collective coauthor.

The collection of Georges Matcheret and Nadia Wolkonsky was created from the 1980’s to the 2000’s and is unlike any other form of “postal art” in the world. Artists, poets, researchers and directors created work on new postal envelopes especially for the collection, and the collector’s innocent amusement became a unique curator’s project that lasted 20 years. The Matcheret family had a wide variety of acquaintances, and today it might serve as the basis as an encyclopedia of late-Soviet, post-Soviet and Russian emigrant art. With rare exceptions, here one can find the names of all the key figures on the art scene of the 1980’s and 2000’s: for A Agroskin to V. Yankilevsky. Many of the Matcheret-Wolkonsky envelopes were neither sent nor received and formally should not be considered mail art. It would be more accurate to call it graphic art, made in the aesthetic of a unique message from the author to the history of art. This is the basis of the phenomenon of “vlop-art” (which is exactly what the collector called the pieces he gathered), a style with its unique features and rules, the driving force of which was Georges Matcheret.

These envelopes were acquired from the collector as a complete collecting project and transferred to the State Hermitage Museum as a gift by the AVC Charity Foundation (A.V. Cheglakov, founder, M.A. Avelicheva, president).

The curator of the exhibit is Ekaterina Vladimirovna Lopatkina, academic associate of the Department of Contemporary Art of the State Hermitage Museum. An illustrated academic catalog has been prepared for the exhibit. The authors are E. Lopatkina, Georges Matcheret and N. Alexeev.

This exhibit was made possible thanks to the support of the AVC Charity Foundation.